In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  Suddenly, for only a split second, he understood something about his wife, he realized why she and Eden had not been speaking to each other before he left for “California” and why they were laughing at him together in an unguarded moment now. For that split second, before he pushed it out of his mind and forced himself to disregard and distrust his suspicions, his discovery did not bother him very much at all. Maurow felt almost relieved. He focused on the issue only long enough to note that, while beneficial in that it would save him and Alice a large amount of grief and angst, his almost apathetic reaction to this development was nevertheless rather curious.

  Laughing, Alice hung up the phone on her husband. To Eden, who was laughing nervously, but who looked frightened and pale, Alice said, “You don’t need to be afraid of him. And you don’t need to hate him.”

  They were both sitting on the floor of Eden’s little apartment, which was in the middle of its fifteen minutes of daily sun. Eden shook her head and shuddered.

  “He’s still the same guy,” Alice said. She turned back to her manuscript. “Each of you is my friend. So you and Blake should be friends, too.”

  “Anyway,” Eden muttered. She looked at a page of notes in Toby Duggins’ handwriting. “Page 150.”

  Alice shuffled through her book. “I don’t even really remember writing this, but I guess Toby wants this page tidied up.” She tossed page 150 to her friend. “See?”

  Eden started reading, and after a moment she turned paler. She looked up at Alice and smiled weakly.

  “That bad?” Alice said. She slid across the floor and read over Eden’s shoulder.

  “Not bad,” her friend said. “Feverish.”

  Alice read. She’d written a scene in which Barnabas — Jake Morris’s rather psychotic henchman — disemboweled an old lady, a police detective’s mother.

  “Toby says you can keep the murder,” Eden said, “but you can’t describe him pulling her liver out while she looks on in horror. He wants a nice clean shooting, and he also wants you to kill off the cop’s dad instead.”

  “Killing an innocent man is less violent than killing an innocent woman?” Alice shrugged. She typed into her laptop for a minute. “Done,” she said.

  “Page 245,” Eden said.

  Alice flipped through the manuscript. “Decapitation of the loose lipped software executive.”

  Eden smiled and looked over at the notes. “Toby says cut the decapitation — forgive the pun — and do away with the murder altogether.”

  Alice blocked out a page of text, clicked delete. “Done,” she said.

  “Page 198. Prostitute slashed from head to toe.”

  Alice shook her head. “Not a prostitute, but an Australian woman in on Jake’s scheme who maybe has turned on him. He and Barnabas stab her and then later dress her like a prostitute, and then they slash her to make it look as though she were killed in those clothes, and finally they leave her in the street in the meat packing district. What’s Toby say?”

  “Drown her,” Eden said.

  Alice nodded. “Nice murders, PG murders. I have to remember for next time.”

  Harriet called back, and Maurow picked up after one ring.

  “I was hoping to ask your secretary to connect me to your voice mail,” she said. “So I’m flustered. Obviously, I don’t want to talk to you. Since when does someone like you start picking up his own calls?”

  “When he knows someone like you is calling,” Maurow said.

  “Ahah.” That was all.

  “Harriet — ”

  “Maurow, I’m sorry.” She started trying to explain. She hated his company, she hated Carly Barrows, she felt personally offended by the things they were doing, and when she received that message from the man in the boat, the closest representative of the Burmese factory owner was Maurow himself. She couldn’t be near him, she could not stand to look at his face, suddenly. “I just have to think about what I’m working on right now. It’s unfair, isn’t it, Maurow? Well, life isn’t fair, right? Didn’t we used to say that? I’m so sorry.”

  “Why?” Maurow asked. “Why are you insisting on the downfall of one alcoholic flash-in-the-pan TV actress? Why do they hate her so pathologically? Why do you hate us so pathologically?”

  “Not pathologically,” Harriet said. She tried to explain, and by the end of her explanation she’d worked herself into something approaching a frenzy of passion, attacking the ambiguities and evils of international capitalism and those who blindly and callously benefit from it, especially unthinking dunces like Carly Barrows. When Harriet finished speaking, she was out-of-breath.

  “You know,” Maurow said, and his lips slipped out a pithy historical fact before his brain could catch up: “The Pointers made their fortune off bathtub gin.”

  “Yeah,” Harriet said. “Well, circle this date. The press conference will be in one week, on the 15th. I’ve got work to do.”

  Just hours after Alice dropped off the bowdlerized manuscript, Toby Duggins telephoned her at her apartment. She picked up the message from a payphone downtown. She was sitting on the docks, looking out over the water to that body of land just across the way, New Jersey or Roosevelt Island, or whatever it was. She called Toby back.

  “Well, your work is done for now,” he said. “I’m having it copied overnight and messengered first thing tomorrow morning to six publishers. I’ll give the editors a week. I’m setting the auction for the 15th.”

  “I’ll circle the date,” Alice said.

  “Just wait,” he said. “They’ll fall all over themselves. You’ve done a great job, Alice.”

  She was dressed in bright colors, the sun was shining, she was very much in love with at least two different people in two very different ways, and for all sorts of different reasons, and she was about to be famous and very productive again. She felt a very big smile on her face, and she put down the telephone, pulled her camera out of her bag. On the dock, Toby’s little voice on the pay phone shouted, “Hello? Hello, Alice?”

  “Sorry,” Alice said, a few seconds later. “I was taking a picture of my face, Tobias. You made me smile a really big smile, and I wanted to save it. And I wanted you to see it.”

  In the morning, a while later, at the breakfast table, Alice poured her husband a cup of coffee, then, in her robe, sat down in his lap and wrapped her arms around him. She told him that it was the day of her auction. He kissed her lips and congratulated her. He remarked that this was the day of the Carly Barrows press conference. “I haven’t handled this very well,” he said. “This guy in a gray suit, he’s going to take care of the press on our side.”

  “Come on,” Alice said. “I’m proud of you, darling.” She squinted, shut one eye, and she carefully straightened his tie, though she knew it didn’t really need straightening.

  Tired from his trip into New York, the man in the gray suit arrived at the press conference half an hour before Harriet Pointer was scheduled to make her appearance. He’d spent the last few days getting familiar again with Burmese repression and trying to understand the corporation’s attempt to cut all traceable ties to the regime and its new, ambitious and completely embryonic “Human Rights Fund.” He was to speak at a press conference, moments after Harriet Pointer, to announce the corporation’s plans and to rebut any clear errors in Pointer’s presentation. He was also authorized to apologize on behalf of his employers in a carefully worded and only slightly self-flagellating statement, and he was also permitted to look mournful as he recited the words.

  All the networks were there, all the New York tabs, the TV newsmagazines. He recognized some faces, but he couldn’t name them. Everyone was running about frantically, setting up, testing sound, maneuvering for the best angle; motion never stopping, like sharks. Out of the murmurings of the crowd, the name Carly Barrows drifted through the air like a ghost.

  After a while, Harriet came into the room and walked up to the microphone, flanked by a trio of rather seedy looking men in inexpensive suits.


  “Thank you for coming.”

  Feedback moved in a wave through the crowd. She put her hand over the microphones, gestured to someone in the throng. After a while she spoke again: “Is this better?” It seemed to be better. She looked around the room, and the man in the gray suit saw her eyes settle on one familiar face: Blake Maurow. Harriet nodded to him, and he nodded back sadly. “Who’s that?” one reporter whispered. The man in the gray suit heard no answer.

  Then, with a breath, Harriet Pointer began speaking with force and complete assurance:

  “You’re here because of Carly Barrows,” she said. “Five years from now, maybe you wouldn’t be. But today, she draws crowds. And this young woman who draws such crowds and inspires such fascination has chosen to make her money from a system that burgeons from child labor and early death. Children have been kidnaped from the jungle from tribes that oppose the government, deposited in government sanctioned industrial parks that thrive on foreign money, including the money spent on the Carly Barrows line, fed bare subsistence food, and left to die at the first sign of illness. Children dead of exhaustion and malnutrition are just dumped into anonymous mass graves. Their parents are never able to find them. Years later, they still wonder.” Harriet took a drink of water. “Undoubtedly, Ms. Barrows will allow each of you to interview her, and she’ll argue that she knew nothing of this when she signed away her name. That may be true. But she never asked. And now that she knows, what is she doing? All we want her to do is say that she’s sorry. Sorry that she’s grown rich on the backs of these children. We just wanted her to come up here to the microphone and tell all of you that this was wrong, and that she’s sorry, and that this sort of thing must stop.” Looking around the room, her eyes met Maurow’s: “I don’t see her here. Her name has killed children as surely as the guns she shoots in those sexy gangster TV movies. All we asked her to do was apologize. Just say she was sorry, that she was sorry for killing those children.” Each time she repeated this point, Pointer seemed to grow more genuinely amazed, astonished that after murdering children, Carly Barrows could deny all of them — the unions, and the TV crews and the tabloids, and one muck-raking lawyer — the courtesy of a simple apology.

  Maurow watched in frozen horror as his ex-wife continued, making her case in damning, iron-clad detail. He knew the assembled reporters might doubt her sincerity, might question her emotion, but Maurow could hear all the pain in Harriet’s voice, all the naked discomfiting sadness of a grieving parent, and he recognized it as genuine.

  First, she showed hidden camera video-tape of young children working in a factory, little boys and girls side-by-side in a huge, windowless room, piecing together garments and wiping sweat from their little faces. Harriet next showed interviews with Burmese peasants identifying their children from still pictures copied from the videotape. Harriet told each child’s story, she gave every parent’s name, provided some little detail about every boy and girl that made each one of them come alive as a real child and then die before his eyes. And then Harriet read eyewitness testimony about the mass graves, a heartbreakingly lucid description that echoed silently in the air when Harriet stopped to breathe.

  There would be no fighting her, Maurow knew, nor did he want to. Maddeningly, his ex-wife had even gained access to bank records and international wire transfers, all showing that the corporation was in cahoots with child-murdering thugs on the other side of the world, all for the sake of some cute skirts and tops and sandals, and a few more millions for Carly Barrows, and Maurow’s corporation, and the banks of the world, and the money lenders, and the securities markets, and the generals in Burma, and the smugglers in Laos, and the retailers in Hoboken, or whatever.

  He buried his head in his hands, and he looked up and Harriet was staring straight at him. Their eyes locked. He looked around, saw reporters and TV cameras gazing at him. He heard this whispered through the room, from a dozen different voices: “Who’s that guy? Who’s he?”

  The hatred surging through Harriet Pointer’s veins surprised even her, yet she was powerless to stop it — it was loose in her bloodstream, like some dangerous and enthralling drug — something that, if it could be concentrated in capsule form, would be so dangerous that even possession of very tiny amounts would be cause for a lifetime prison sentence — and she could not resist reveling in it, giving in to it. Just days after falling so completely under his spell, she wondered, as her mouth blared out eloquent expressions of terrible contempt, why do I now hate him so? She desperately wanted or needed to hate him, and against all sense of fairness or justice, she did hate him, and a full rationale followed. He was an empty hollow man. A capitalist. He’d married a girl younger than his daughter. He had snatched children from their crying parents, out of their loving parents’ arms. He was a kidnaper. A baby-napper. A baby-killer. He, Blake Maurow, was guilty. But above and beyond all that, she had to break with him, to hate him, to wreck all memories of him for a simple reason — she was otherwise a happy woman. Harriet Pointer’s love for Blake Maurow was the one unhappy thing in her life, an unhappy passion that smashed through every barrier she tried to erect. If it had to be passion, it would be passionate hatred. And now, standing here at this lectern, a tangled mess of microphones in her face, her ex-husband’s pained eyes staring into her own, she knew that, at last, he deserved this.

  The man in the gray suit did not understand why all attention had turned to Blake Maurow, whose white face now glowed in the harsh television lights. The crowd of reporters parted like the Red Sea, cutting a straight path between Maurow and the union lawyer. Harriet Pointer still spoke, and her voice rose, and her gaze never left his boss, who seemed to be withering in the glare. She continued to read her speech, which seemed written for the public in general, and the media in particular, but which she now directed at Maurow, her voice filled more with sorrow than the anger she’d saved for Carly Barrows.

  “You saw those little children,” she said. “Choose any one of them. The little eight-year-old boy sewing ‘Carly Barrows Designer Label’ on miniskirts. Imagine where he was the day before. Ask yourself whether his mother and father saw him taken, or whether he just vanished one afternoon. What do you think? Sure, this was the other side of the world, it was little kids who don’t look like us or talk like or act like us, and their parents don’t get up in the morning and take a car service to an office in midtown. It’s fashionable to believe that over there, parents are used to their children dying, that they don’t care about it the way we do. And that somehow the sheer mass of the terror makes each child’s own terror a little less terrible. Well, I can’t get inside their heads, but I’m guessing that’s wrong.

  “I ask you just to think of the parents, of the empty space in their home where their child once was. Imagine the ache in their hearts, and realize that you did this to them, for the sake of a little more profit. Think of a little child’s pain and fear. Just try to imagine it in your mind. Each of these children is a person, a little, innocent being who knows and realizes to the pit of his terrified soul that his life is ending. But when you hear about these crimes, all you think is whether the situation is fixable. How can this all be smoothed over? you ask. How can we minimize this uncomfortable situation? You, with your dollars — ” and here, Harriet Pointer turned away from Maurow and toward the crowd — “as a culture, as a society, you have stopped caring, and so you with your dollars are the killers of these children.”

  The man in the gray suit could not stop looking at Blake Maurow, at the crunching anguish on his face slowly growing deeper and more pained. It was almost impossible to bear, but he could not stop watching. His boss was being squeezed. Though he did not know why it should be so, each accusation from Harriet Pointer was another turn of the screw. Very slowly, moisture touched Maurow’s eyes, two tiny pools filling with dew. He blinked them away. More insistently, tears appeared in the corners of his eyes, which he tapped gently with one finger. Still speaking, insistently and harshly, Harriet Pointer bore
down on him, like an animal coming in for the kill. Though she still stood at the lectern behind the microphones, to the man in the gray suit, it seemed as though she were standing directly in front of Blake Maurow. She seemed ten feet tall, and Maurow looked the size of a little boy.

  A few moments later, and all of a sudden, tears were streaming down Blake Maurow’s cheeks. Tears that sparkled like diamonds in the blaze of the harsh television lights. Maurow turned and moved quickly to the back of the room and out an exit door, not running, just moving efficiently. Some technicians with hand-held cameras started to follow him, and the man in the gray suit, feeling sympathy and bafflement and shock at whatever it was that had overtaken his boss, swung a hand into the air. He called out his own name, introduced himself as a “representative of the Carly Barrows Designer Label.

  “Let me tell you a few things that we are doing,” he called out, “as a responsible corporate world citizen, to improve the lot of children on this planet. First, let me apologize on behalf of Carly Barrows for her absence here today, but her work as the global spokesperson of the Trans-African Relief Agency has found her busy this afternoon raising funds to assist Mozambique and the Frelimo government in recovering from its recent civil war.”